I have no idea what i'm doing, but I did make dinner.

Let’s face it, fried food tastes good. I love it all. Chicken strips, chicken fried steak, fried fish, you name it. But, even besides calories, fried food has a lot of cons: The time it takes to bread each piece, watch it, fry it, flip it, and then you’re left with a giant mess in the kitchen. No thanks. So, i’m pretty excited that this “oven-fried” catfish turned out so well. Perfectly seasoned, crispy, and moist, yum! While the catfish is cooking in the oven, you can whip up whatever sides you like, or even try out my homemade tartar sauce recipe. It’s super easy and you probably already have most of the ingredients on hand!

Ingredients, assemble!!!

Yep, that’s all you need. Oh, and eggs. I forgot the eggs. Okay, let’s start prep. First, preheat your oven to 425. Get your baking sheet ready with some parchment paper, spray the parchment paper with the olive oil spray. I gave it a pretty heavy coat. have your olive oil spray on hand, and you’ll need two dishes ready to bread your fish: One for the eggs and one for the cornmeal mix. Lastly, cut your fish into smaller pieces, like so:

So, serving-wise, two of the cut up pieces was enough for an adult, and one for a child. So, I got too much. But it made great leftovers the next day, no regrets. You’re going to double dip each piece of fish, cornmeal, eggs, cornmeal, then, lay it down on the pan with the parchment paper. Once you get all your fish breaded, spray each piece with the olive oil spray, again, going heavy, you want it to be saturated. This will aid in maximum crispiness.

Next, pop it in the oven for 25-30 minutes, until golden and you see the edges start to brown, and…ta-da! Perfectly seasoned, crispy, moist catfish.

Serve it up with your favorite sides and you’re good to go. We ate ours with fried okra and pasta salad. Yeah, we had a carb party. Don’t judge. Enjoy!

Preheat your oven to 425 degrees, and line a baking sheet with parchment paper and spray liberally all over with olive oil spray.

In a medium-sized dish or bowl, add the cornmeal, flour, seasoned salt, pepper, lemon pepper, and paprika, and mix well. In a second dish, whisk the eggs.

Dip each piece of the fish into the cornmeal mixture, then eggs (shaking off excess), back in the cornmeal mixture, then lay on the prepared baking sheet with the parchment paper. Repeat with all the fish.

Spray each of the pieces of fish generously with olive oil spray, making sure to saturate each piece all over.